Customer Reviews

Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Poe's Children: The New Horror, an Anthology edited by Peter Straub is a terrific collection of short stories by a varied collection of authors. Straub includes one of his own stories, Little Red's Tango, a story that is sure to grab the reader's attention. I have to admit that I had a little difficulty getting into the rhythm of the story, but once I did I found Little Red's Tango to be truly worthwhile. Also included is a great story by Stephen King, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, another story dealing with an author who is convinced that his typewriter is possessed. I think this is King at is "short story" best.

I was also pleased to see that Neil Gaiman was included with his October in the Chair. Here's a list of all the stories included in Poe's Children:

The Bees Dan Chaon
Cleopatra Brimstone Elizabeth Hand
The Man on the Ceiling Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
The Great God Pan M. John Harrison
The Voice of the Beach Ramsey Campbell
Body Brian Evenson
Louise's Ghost Kelly Link
The Sadness of Detail Jonathan Caroll
Leda M. Rickert
In Praise of Folly Thomas Tessier
Plot Twist David J. Schow
The Two Sams Glen Hirshberg
Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story Thomas Ligotti
Unearthed Benjamin Percy
Gardner of Heart Bradford Morrow
Little Red's Tango Peter Straub
The Ballad of the Flixible Bullet Stephen King
20th Century Ghost Joe Hill
The Green Glass Sea Ellen Klages
The Kiss Tia V. Travis
Black Dust Graham Joyce
October in the Chair Neil Gaiman
Missolonghi 1824 John Crowley
Insect Dreams Rosilind Palermo Stevenson

Also included at the end is a brief biography of each of the authors.

I suspect that like many readers, I have just a wee bit of difficulty reading when the story/author changes. Authors write with their own cadence. It always takes me a page or two to get in step, but other than that, I look forward to new anthologies, especially in the horror genre.

The best story in the collection, in my opinion only has to be October in the Chair by Gaiman, followed closely by Cleopatra's Brimstone. Picking these over the others is really pretty arbitrary since all of the stories are grabbers.

All things considered, Poe's Children is a unique collection by a diverse group of authors.
I highly recommend.

There are two problems with Poe's Children, a collection edited by Peter Straub. One is inherent to all anthologies composed of different authors: you aren't going to like everyone.

The second problem is the editing. The stories have all been previously published, so the words haven't been tampered with. But Poe's Children is an example of how the reader's perception of individual stories can be influenced within the context of their order within an anthology. Stories are placed in sort of thematic chunks that in theory seems like a good idea but in practice gets to feeling rather redundant. By the third story in a row about a protagonist trying to cope with the death of a loved one ("The Two Sams," "Unearthed," "Gardener of Heart") you're sick of grieving heroes. It's unfair to the individual merits of each story to lump them together so you can only really see their similarities rather than their differences, and in this capacity I feel Straub did his authors a disservice.

Of 24 stories there were only two I loved unreservedly. Twentieth Century Ghost, by Joe Hill, is a brooding modern Gothic piece about a haunted theater. (Ghosts always seem to haunt theaters, don't they?) And Louise's Ghost is dark, funny, incisive, bizarre, and heartbreaking--in other words, a Kelly Link story. I highly recommend short story collections by either author.

Stories that I enjoyed: "The Sadness of Detail," by Jonathan Caroll, was good, and refreshingly brief, an existentialist validation of art with disturbing theological implications. "The Bees" is a good story about past regrets that uses genre elements as a metaphor, though it seems almost like an afterthought. "In Praise of Folly" is a brief story with an obvious cymbal clash climax, which works because it doesn't overstay its welcome. I rather liked "The Kiss," about a woman coming to terms with her infamous jazz-singing Jezebel mother's untimely death. "The Green Glass Sea" is a stomach-churning exercise in dramatic irony about a vacation to a nuclear bomb test site. David Schow has fun with "Plot Twist," a study of survival in the face of personality clash for three immature adults on an aborted vacation to Vegas. "Missolonghi 1824" is a pretty neat story of the long-ago and far away and forgotten, when Lord Byron happens upon a captured Greek god. And "Gardener of Heart" is a story of going home again, as the protagonist returns to his hometown to bury his twin sister.

The rest is a mishmash of varying degrees of quality. "The Voice of the Beach" is pretty typical neo-Lovecraftian gobbledygook of the sort that Ramsey Campbell is known for; it's well-written but personally I don't have much fascination for the spaces between reality that Lovecraft fans seem to embrace. "The Great God Pan," "The Man on the Ceiling," and "Body" are another unofficial trio, this time united by surrealism and ambiguity. I don't mind ambiguity, in fact I rather enjoy it, but with all these stories I felt like the authors didn't know any more than I did and just wanted an excuse to connect vague ideas.

"Black Dust," "The Two Sams," and "Unearthed" are perfectly functional but none of them really stood out to me. I like the iconography of "Cleopatra Brimstone" but it was overlong and felt random at points; what was the meaning of all the S&M counterculture apart from a superficial representation of character development? "Insect Dreams" has some interesting ideas and touches on a true horror (slavery) in a way that doesn't feel cheap, but it could have been briefer. And King's early piece "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" just doesn't do anything new.

"Notes on the Writing of Horror" is long-winded and dull. "Little Red's Tango" is sporadically intriguing but ultimately I failed to grasp the point. "Leda" is just bizarre. And "October in the Chair" was disappointing. Neil Gaiman is my favorite author and I really like the device of having the months gathered around a campfire to tell tales, but that same device also felt like a meager justification allowing the story-within-a-story to remain unfinished.

Is the collection worth checking out? More than definitely. But don't expect a grand slam of every story.

Peter Straub selects 24 short stories that represent "the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades." The crossover between works usually classified as fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres and those considered to be literary, he asserts, "erases boundaries and blurs distinctions."

Two of the better tales are Stephen King's "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" (1984)--a story about the genesis of insanity, featuring a writer who suffers from the paranoid delusion that an imp inhabits his typewriter--and Elizabeth Hand's "Cleopatra Brimstone" (2001), a story about an entomologist who is sexually assaulted and wreaks her revenge on men by "collecting" them in bizarre fashion.

King and Hand, plus 22 other New Wave horror writers, exhibit telltale affinities with the spooky imagination of Edgar A. Poe.

If you are a fan of horror stories written by inventive wordsmiths, this quality work is just your cup of tea!

About the author: Peter Straub is the author of 17 novels, including Ghost Story and Koko, as well as two collaborations with Stephen King. Winner of eight Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, two world Fantasy Awards, and both a Lifetime Achievement Award and election as a Grand Master from the Horror Writers Association. He lives in New York City.

I've been a huge fan of Peter Straub since I first read Ghost Story. Koko, The Talisman, and Black House are among my favorite novels. But this collection of "horror" fiction utterly baffled me. It's as if Straub sought out the oddest stuffiest stories he could find. Not a one (even an old Stephen King number from Skeleton Crew) is the least bit scary.

I'll just go through a few:

In "Green Glass Sea", a father takes his family out to White Sands shortly after the first atomic bomb testing. The heat from the fireball melted the sand into green glass. His kids take some of the glass for souvenirs. He checks it with a geiger counter. The end. Seriously, that's the entire story.

"The Bees" is a well written slice-of-life vignette, but again, not scary in the least.

"Leda" is about a woman raped by a swan. She lays an egg. You can't make this stuff up.

"Body" was incomprehensible to me. A killer who can't tell women from shoes is tormented by an order of leather-obsessed monks?

"Sadness of Detail" is actually unsettling. I kicked it up a notch, as Emeril would say, for that story alone.

"Plot Twist" is a gimmicky unbelievable mess.

"Insect Dreams" is full of one line paragraphs like the following:
"Entranced she is looking, in a fever she is looking."

Yawn.

Interesting collection of "literary" horror stories of various flavors and stripes. Of course, the "literary" qualification means that more than once you'll be saying to yourself, "Hmmmmmm, I wonder what the writer was going for there." But that's okay-- the stories aren't boring, and striking imagery and characterizations abound. Definitely not a bad book to read in a discussion group, though, as readers would likely benefit from bouncing ideas and observations off one another about the colorful, often intense strangeness on display.

An illuminating introduction by editor Peter Straub discusses the importance of these often complex stories on the publishing map, lauding their authors for writing scary, disturbing fiction that nevertheless resists being classified simply as "horror fiction".

I actually listened to the audiobook edition of "Poe's Children", which features unabridged selections (about a dozen) from the printed version. It's an excellent production, beautifully read by a variety of narrators. However, I wish there was a little break between stories, perhaps a ten or twenty second musical interlude, so the impact of one story could sink in before we go right into the next one.

But that's a quibble. Audio or print version, this is easily recommended for short story enthusiasts with a sense of adventure. I may actually pick up the print edition at some point (maybe download it on my Kindle), so I can experience the stories that weren't included in the audio version.

What do you think of when someone mentions the Horror genre - vampires and zombies? Homicidal monsters shredding people's throats? Well, there is so much more to Horror than that. This interesting book brings together Horror short stories written by twenty-four different authors, each written in their own individual style.

Now, there are way too many stories in this book to give a synopsis all of them, and they are all so different. I really like The Bees, which I found to be the most horrifying of them all - so ripe with horror and regret. And The Two Sams was absolutely heart breaking.

Yeah, this is an excellent anthology. And, do you know what's the best thing about reading anthologies like this one? It allows you to discover wonderful authors that you have never read before. I really enjoyed this book, and don't hesitate to recommend it.

If you're looking for stories to keep you up at night, looking over your shoulder every once in a while, this is not your anthology. If you're looking for short stories with a supernatural element but nothing at all scary then maybe try this out. I understand not every story needs to be a fright-fest to be a good horror story, but quite honestly I cant count the times I was shaking my head after finishing a story and just saying to myself "How is this a horror story?" Many times I would reach the last page completely baffled.

I am a huge fan of horror/suspense anthologies, and this was by far the most disappointing. I understand Peter Straub was going for different, nontraditional styles of horror stories, but I really feel he missed the mark.

There are a few good stories in here, but again, nothing scary or creepy in my opinion (SPOILERS):

"The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" by Stephen King is about an author descending into insanity and how his insanity becomes contagious among those around him. An average King short that I think most will enjoy, but he has much creepier work.

"The Bees" by Dan Chaon was decent. It is the first short in the collection and probably the creepiest, which makes the entire rest of the anthology that much more disappointing. This story involves a man with a hidden past coming back to haunt him.

Now to the bad/horrible ones:

Probably the most head scratching story in this collection was "The Green Glass Sea" by Ellen Klages. Not a bad story on its own, but what it's doing in a horror anthology I have no clue. A man and his children drive to the site of the first atomic bomb test, and take home pieces of the sand which have turned to glass from the test. That's it.

In "Unearthed" by Benjamin Percy, a Father and his son dig up the grave of a native american whose body is mummified by still intact...which they take home with them and display as a decoration. Sounds promising! Alas, the Dad does act a little weird, but nothing actually happens. The body ends up getting destroyed without any repercussions. This in a nutshell describes the entire anthology, somewhat creepy atmospheres, tones in the beginning that lead to no payoff.

If you're looking for horror I suggest the Mammoth Book's of Horror edited by Stephen Jones, much more bang for your book.

I read 10 stories in this anthology and although two of them were outstanding ("Cleopatra Brimstone" by Elizabeth Hand and "20th Century Ghost" by Joe Hill) and one was good ("Plot Twist" by David Schow) the others were a bit disappointing. The whole "literary horror" theme is pretentious to me. Why do these stories deserve the title "literary horror"? To me a story is good or isn't and being skillful and eloquent with words can't save a mediocre story. Many of these stories were well written but were just boring.

Quick rundown of the others I read: "The Bees" was okay, "The Man on the Ceiling" was the worst of the lot and not even a story, "The Great God Pan" was confusing, "The Voice on the Beach" was slow and not in the least bit scary, "The Sadness of Detail" was interesting but needed a better ending, "In Praise of Folly" was creepy but cliched, and "October in the Chair" was pointless.

Half the stories in this book are not worthy of the title "Poe's Children." The title is very misleading as half of the stories do not resonate with Poe's works. Edgar Allen Poe is a tough act to follow, and some of the writers come close to Poe's atmospheric style, the others fall far short of the master. Some of the stories drag and have no visual impact and other stories just sit there. Which made me scratch my head and say "What?!" Further editing would have made the book worthy of the title "Poe's Children." A more appropriate title might be "Poe's Children and Others."

I like horror. I like literature. I like many of these authors. I didn't like this book.

There were a few decent selections, of course, but all in all this book confirmed my previous distaste for multi-author anthologies of short fiction. Unless they're exceptionally well-edited, with a carefully crafted theme to help thread the stories together, they often simply feel disjointed and boring. And "boring" is a particularly bad thing for a horror anthology to be.

In this particular case, I'm pretty sure there wasn't any theme at all. I think, instead, it may have been a compilation of entries in a contest: Best Use of the Word "Chiaroscuro" In a Literary Horror Story. Because I'm pretty sure that obscure little shard of vocabulary got jabbed into my eye in at least half of these stories. Poe's all about theatrical word choices, and he does tend to overuse his favorites, such as "trepidation," "aperture" and "phantasmagorical," but for goodness' sake. Constant repetition of obscure multisyllabic words does not automatically make one's work "Poe-like."